RFE: move from distutils to setuptools (& `setup.py build_sphinx`)

[tkloczko@barrel ipython-7.24.1]$ grep distutils setup.py
# BEFORE importing distutils, remove MANIFEST. distutils doesn't properly
from distutils.core import setup
# custom distutils commands
from distutils.command.sdist import sdist

Looks like ipython is still using distutils and by this it does not support setup.py build_sphinx:

+ /usr/bin/python3 setup.py build_sphinx -b man --build-dir build/sphinx
/usr/lib64/python3.8/distutils/dist.py:274: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'project_urls'
  warnings.warn(msg)
usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]
   or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]
   or: setup.py --help-commands
   or: setup.py cmd --help

error: invalid command 'build_sphinx'

It would be good to move to setuptools.

[pradyunsg]

My two cents: it would be a good idea to move to flit, since IPython is a pure-Python project and doesn’t need most of the additional capabilities afforded by setuptools.

[kloczek]

distutils is also deprecated from Python 3.10 : https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0632/

Good point. I just added note in my ticket against flit to not generate settup.py with import distutils becasue oof that PEP.